The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.
The Internet promotes global communication. A computer application available on the Web, such as a mobile app, could be downloaded by user computers, such as mobile devices, located in a large number of geographic regions. Certain operating systems may offer native support for localization. Application developers are encouraged to take advantage of such native support to make their applications available in as many languages as possible.
Typically, an application developer can create, for each desired language, a translation for each of the electronic resources—text strings, sounds, graphics, etc. to be presented to a user—in his or her application and store these translations in a specific format, such as an XML, file. The developer can then package these translations together with a computer program as his or her application for download. Each download to a user computer creates a specific instance of the application, storing the translations in specific locations on the user computer. Upon execution, the specific instance can rely on the operating system running on the user computer to load the translation for a chosen language from one of the specific locations.
However, the translations prepared by the application developer could come short under certain circumstances. For example, those translations may be inadequate when organizations prefer internal jargon to standard terms. Furthermore, proper translations may be missing for specialized or fast-moving industries. On the other hand, different users might desire updated translations for different portions of the electronic resources, or different translations even for the same portion of the electronic resources in the same language. It could be a challenge to properly manage the translations in meeting the diverse needs of all the users.